This invention relates generally to the field of perishable fruit preservation. More particularly, it concerns preserving intact leaves, foliage, and edible fruit on a cut-limb from a tree orchard to a remote consumer.
Typically, fruit is harvested and distributed to consumers by picking, optionally cold-warehousing, packaging and distributing boxes of individual fruits sans leaves and limbs to wholesale and/or retail outlets. Fruits typically are picked at an intentionally unripe “commercial maturity” under conventional methodology and are hopefully ripe when purchased by a consumer in a market. This is hit and miss, as there is little control over the time to market and there are many entities typically involved in distribution over which the fruit grower has at best only nominal control. Thus, fruit often is displayed for retail purchase in an unripe or over-ripe condition that adversely impacts its aesthetic quality, edibility, and so-called ‘shelf life’ at the retailer's place of business and in the consumer's home.
Moreover, fruit displayed for purchase in retail outlets is just that: fruit. There is no previously known way to leave fruit and leaves on the limb in a natural and beautiful configuration while the fruit is in distribution, on a store's produce shelf or in a consumer's home or office. As a result, the live and natural beauty of the fruit—rooted in the context of a pastoral tree orchard setting—is lost on the consumer. This is because, without proper processing and careful handling from tree branch to retail outlet or consumer, the fruit, leaves, and skin on a limb begin immediately upon cutting to visibly, sensually, tactilely or otherwise deteriorate. Fruit over-ripens and turns pithy; leaves brown and dry out; limbs peel and snap.